


All I Recall With Clarity

by Aegypius



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen, Ro2SID
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23714914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegypius/pseuds/Aegypius
Summary: Tisarwat reconstructs herself
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23
Collections: Republic of Two Systems Independence Day Exchange 2020





	All I Recall With Clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



> Ro2SID fic.

The person who was once Anaander Mianaai stands in her quarters, eyes closed, and considers her body.

 _Her_ body.

For three thousand years she had inhabited it, replicated and multiplied it, and she knows it absolutely. She knows every step of it's life, from birth to old age, as consistent and repetitive as the orbit of a planet around a sun. Over the centuries countless identical iterations of herself have stood in countless identical cabins aboard countless ships, and so a part of her knows that from where she stands now she can take two steps forward, and midway through the third step her foot will hit the bench against the far wall.

But she is no longer Anaander, and even when she was, her body had not been Anaander's body.

(That had been the mistake, after all. Her implants had never been intended for use on another person, and from the moment the connection had clicked home, she had known that these were not her limbs, not her ears and eyes and skin. There was no room for her here, and her thoughts had scraped and torn against the corners of an unfamiliar brain.)

Tisarwat's body, she has not known for three millennia. It is newly-grown and awkward, still changing, and it bears little resemblance to Anaander Mianaai's, in shape or height. This is why she is standing now, two-and-a-half long-legged steps from the wall of her room.

She steps forward once. Twice. Three times.

The person who was once Tisarwat stands in front of a mirror, and considers her mind.

Her memories of the time before Tisarwat's death are split neatly into two distinct tracks, converging only at the end. One traces a clear line back through time some fourteen years, from her last panicked moments all the way back to the blurred impressions of early childhood; the other is as vast and fragmented as Anaander herself.

(There was far too much of her for any one mind to hold more than a fraction of her knowledge. From centuries of memory she had selected all the pieces she would need, for the place she was going.)

She recalls, twice over, the point at which the tracks intersect. Tisarwat, kneeling before the Lord of the Radch, looking up (looking down) at a face she had seen in images and broadcasts a thousand times before (had seen once, in a picture attached to a personnel file). She remembers being led down a hallway and into a little room set up as a surgery (remembers telling the kid to lie down on the table, while another of herself finishes preparing the implants). It had never even occurred to her that she might not obey.

An hour later, Tisarwat was dead, and Anaander Mianaai looked up into her own eyes. Looked down, at the same time, into someone else's. She had stumbled, then, from the table onto the floor, and been sick.

She looks now at the same face in the mirror. It had once been Tisarwat's. It had never been Anaander's. It is now, she is quite certain, her own.

She was Anaander Mianaai for three millennia. She was Tisarwat for seventeen years. She was Anaander Mianaai for seven days. She is growing, she thinks, into something else entirely.


End file.
